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Spaceships and Future Tech


Zelly

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So I found these 2 topics which mainly discuss Scadrial's potential FTL travel:

But I'm curious about non-Scadrial FTL travel.  Let's talk SCIENCE.  Note: I don't know much about science! But I like it!

Roshar is all about gems and storing energy within them.  

On earth do stuff with glass, prisms, and crystals I don't remotely understand:

Crystals as data storage  (wut)

Liquid Crystal Displays that make up all our tvs, tablets, etc  (huh)

Don't even get me started on the uses of Quartz (what is this sorcery)

Also back to sci-fi, Star Trek's got it's dilithium crystals, so I think we could have potential there.  :P

Get some gemhearts, cut em the right way, hook em up with some sort of frequency/resonance fabrial, mix in 2 tbs of stormlight and a captured star spren or travel/exploration spren.  Bake for a few thousand years and voila, FTL.

Elantrians I think could easily do space travel with the proper aons, but they'd have to do some serious growth in scientific understanding first just to get the basic knowledge to proceed.

Nalthis is an unknown.  Awakening is such a crazy ability.  But like the Elantrians, I think the current science level is way off, as well as the current knowledge of Commands.

Any science fiends out have any thoughts to contribute?

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Based on this WoB, I don't think Nalthis is going to be a major player in the same way the other three aformentioned planets are. In fact, I've always seen Nalthis as an afterthought in the grand scheme of the cosmere - It only really exists to introduce a few important players for SA. 

WRT Sel - AonDor and the Elantrians are certainly the best hope for the Selish to get off-planet. The biggest problem is the cognitive aspect of their Shards, which I think they were trying to get around in MB:SH anyway (and failed). Even then, keep in mind that Elantris is meant to be set a few hundred years before Rashek's Ascension. I can't find the WoB specifically, but IIRC, Elantris is meant to be 1300 years before the events of TFE, and 1500 years before we see Galladon again at the shores of the Purelake. For context, 700AD was the year the Chinese invented gunpowder, so look how far Sel could have come in all that time. 

You're probably on the right lines for Roshar. Some people theorise that Ashyn has technology that'll be useful in their floating cities, but Roshar itself doesn't have any of those yet. How exactly they get off planet, I'm not sure about, but I certainly think it's a combination of fabrial tech and however Ashyn uses the 10 surges

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For Sel, I'd suggest building a big space station in selstationary (geostationary) orbit above Elantris. Use aons to create two way portals between the station and a destination star system. This would allow for both travel to the system in question as well as back. If you want to return, you can use seons to tell the station to open a portal for you (assuming seons communicate ftl). The main drawbacks her would be whether or not aons can create these portals across large distances and if the station would be able to get enough dor to be able to actually open them (possible build it on the ground instead of in space). If they can actually create dor storage containers and find a way to run aons of them this wouldn't be necessary of course, as they could use the stored dor as fuel (could possibly be used in combination with the first idea, for emergency transport or going of the grid).

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@kenod, I agree. In the grand tradition of "big dumb objects" in science fiction, I'd like to see a giant moon-sized space ship shaped like an Aon, with an an Aon-encrusted power core that carries a piece of the Dor in some kind of cognitive bubble.

But I think a lot of the space travel will just be a more high-tech version of the current worldhopping. People will find more ways to to get in and out of the cognitive realm, and drive to other planets in huge investiture-powered cognitive trucks. Or a railroad! Forget transwarp conduits. Forget mass relays. We can have the Trans-Shadesmar Railroad!

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50 minutes ago, Belzedar said:

But I think a lot of the space travel will just be a more high-tech version of the current worldhopping. People will find more ways to to get in and out of the cognitive realm, and drive to other planets in huge investiture-powered cognitive trucks. Or a railroad! Forget transwarp conduits. Forget mass relays. We can have the Trans-Shadesmar Railroad!

I actually really like the idea of a Railroad!  We could call it..........Galaxy Express 999 (winks if you get the ref).

Now I hope there is a Cognitive railroad. :wub:   Also some great imagery of those airships Navani was working on.....put an Elsecaller onboard and away you go.

I wonder if expanding into space and the Cognitive Realm would end up negating the ease of travel.  The whole reason the Cognitive Realm takes less time to move between solar systems is the lack of thoughts/idea that are the literal foundation of the realm.

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10 hours ago, kenod said:

If they can actually create dor storage containers and find a way to run aons of them this wouldn't be necessary of course, as they could use the stored dor as fuel (could possibly be used in combination with the first idea, for emergency transport or going of the grid).

I'd like to talk to you about Aluminum.

Quote

The_Carpathian
Can aluminum be used to take liquid from a Shard pool, and will it stay Invested?

Brandon Sanderson
That would work.

The Pool is one state of Shardic Power, and the Dor is another, so this should work.
Heat resistance is gonna be a big pain, but I'm sure there's a way around that. (Liquid Cooling the Dor, that'll go swimmingly :P)

1 hour ago, Belzedar said:

Or a railroad! Forget transwarp conduits. Forget mass relays. We can have the Trans-Shadesmar Railroad!

The mental image for this is wonderful. It must be done!

10 hours ago, kenod said:

Use aons to create two way portals between the station and a destination star system. This would allow for both travel to the system in question as well as back.

I still don't think you can "portal" with Aon Tia. To me, it's a one and done. That said, you can use Tia Plates from the geostationary station and the ground, since the distance and direction shouldn't change.

On 3/18/2018 at 2:58 PM, Aurimus_ said:

I can't find the WoB specifically, but IIRC, Elantris is meant to be 1300 years before the events of TFE,

That... might be from me, indirectly. We have "far earlier(than HoA). It's quite... It's not thousands" and I pulled 1,400 as a number to fit that criteria. I felt Brandon would've said Centuries/Hundreds if it was under 1K(like he does in this WoB), and anything 1,500+ would round up to thousands(plural), so I picked something in-between.

Nothing else with the "chronology" tag on Arcanum gives any additional details though, but your point about a lot of time passing is still valid.

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17 hours ago, Belzedar said:

@kenod, I agree. In the grand tradition of "big dumb objects" in science fiction, I'd like to see a giant moon-sized space ship shaped like an Aon, with an an Aon-encrusted power core that carries a piece of the Dor in some kind of cognitive bubble.

Considering how unstable the Dor is, wouldn't this be a Sel-ish Death Star?

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Let's avoid the entire issue of the Dor needing to be fixed, and just use the magics of Sel to use the planet itself as their spaceship. Fly around, carry all of the Dor with you, and blow up anything in your way. 

All problems solved. They just need miniature suns to maintain temperature, and the Dor should be capable of that. 

Edited by Calderis
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2 hours ago, Calderis said:

Let's avoid the entire issue of the Dor needing to be fixed, and just use he magics of Sel to use the planet itself as their spaceship. Fly around, carry all of the Dor with you, and blow up anything in your way. 

All problems solved. They just miniature suns  to maintain temperature, and for should be capable of that. 

But having to fix the Dor is part of the fun with theorizing about this kind of stuff.

"Yeah let's just avoid the entire issue of how you achieve FTL travel and everything's fixed."

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2 minutes ago, Leyrann said:

But having to fix the Dor is part of the fun with theorizing about this kind of stuff.

"Yeah let's just avoid the entire issue of how you achieve FTL travel and everything's fixed."

Maybe it's just me, but a planet 50% larger than earth teleporting around the Cosmere seems pretty impressive. 

Edited by Calderis
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2 minutes ago, Calderis said:

Maybe it's just me, but a planet 50% larger than earth teleporting around the Cosmere seems pretty impressive. 

Wait, I wasn't reading your post properly lol. I thought you didn't want to talk about the need to take the Dor with you and instead just wanted to focus on the possibilities of the Aons.

Yes, carrying about Sel with you is pretty impressive.

Also, 50% larger than Earth? Is that surface size, diameter, volume? Also how much is land actually?

Edited by Leyrann
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2 minutes ago, Leyrann said:

Yeah, but what is size? I assume diameter, but is it stated explicitly?

Yes it's diameter. Like Roshar is 0.9 earth, but 0.7 gravity, so you can factor that the overall density is different as well. 

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Just now, Leyrann said:

Yeah, but what is size? I assume diameter, but is it stated explicitly?

Uh... give me a sec. Khriss only says size in both examples.

Quote

"[Sel] is 1.5 times the Cosmere standard in size."
"[Roshar] [..] 0.7 in gravity and 0.9 in size."

We're fairly certain it's diameter(as Calderis just said), but it's not explicitly stated to my knowledge

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2 minutes ago, The One Who Connects said:

We're fairly certain it's diameter(as Calderis just said), but it's not explicitly stated to my knowledge

I just don't see another option. The only other thing that I could see as plausible would be mass but then it should be linked pretty well linearly to gravity. 

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21 hours ago, Calderis said:

I just don't see another option. The only other thing that I could see as plausible would be mass but then it should be linked pretty well linearly to gravity. 

I remember people suggesting the idea of it being surface area.

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Nalthis, of all of them, should be the easiest, if you have sufficient physics knowledge. Just make the exterior of the spaceship of a useful material (probably not metal) and awaken it with a command like, 'produce a tachyon field' , or 'warp space-time' , or (if you believe the ER-EPR theory) then simply 'create wormhole' . 

The commands would need to be more detailed with specific numbers, but it should be within the grasp of the average educated Awakener and his/her crew. 

A similar trick should be possible on Taldain if Autonomy allowed it. 

Edited by ZenBossanova
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The other thing I wonder about, is if mass, and energy and investiture are all interchangeable, then does empty space have a zero-point level of Investiture, like it does for energy. Could the appropriate misting be able to drain that (like in the Casimir effect)? If so, that should generate negative space-time curvature. If that is possible, then you could make a Alcubierre drive. 

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A recent WoB discusses the possibility of teleportation through the Spiritual Realm. If you find a reliable, stable way to enter the SR, and then exit at a point of your choosing (and not destroy yourself or the universe on the way through), you can probably go anywhere in the cosmere in the blink of an eye. That might make spaceships obsolete.

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7 minutes ago, Belzedar said:

A recent WoB discusses the possibility of teleportation through the Spiritual Realm. If you find a reliable, stable way to enter the SR, and then exit at a point of your choosing (and not destroy yourself or the universe on the way through), you can probably go anywhere in the cosmere in the blink of an eye. That might make spaceships obsolete.

It might be safer to build something that can rocket you across the cognitive realm, basically using it as a form of hyperspace.

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I've always said I think its a mistake to count Nalthis out of the heavy hitters, magic system wise. I know we have that WoB that it isn't as central to the greater cosmere plot as Shardworlds like Roshar and Scadrial and Sel, but I've always thought the reason Brandon said that could have a lot more to do with the fact that Nalthis only has one Shard, who seems content to stay out of the thick of things, and that's why Nalthis isn't as 'key' as other Shardworlds. Not because its magic, technology, or potential for its inhabitants to be major players are less than other Shardworlds.

We really know very little about the full capabilities of Awakening when paired with advanced scientific knowledge. But I think its very notable that the single most powerful manmade artifact in the cosmere, Nightblood, is the product of Awakening (and an active attempt to hack another Shardworld's magic system, trying to replicate the Shardblades of Roshar), and some of the most knowledgeable people in the cosmere, the Five Scholars, are from Nalthis. Who not only created Nightblood, but also accomplished some of the other most magically significant feats in the cosmere, such as the creation of the Lifeless army. I think there's a great deal we don't know about Awakening still, and there's enough of a history of scientific/investiture exploration on Nalthis even early on in the cosmere timeline, I would be very surprised if the people of that planet weren't capable of space travel by the time Scadrial is at least.

(Although I do think the nature of each Shardworld's magic lends itself to their respective scientific achievements being focused in different directions. For instance, given the nature of spren and the Surges, I highly expect Roshar to be the cosmere's leading expert in quantum physics someday, whereas Scadrial's sciences have the potential to be geared primarily towards the understanding and manipulation of molecular structures, etc, and the biological associations of Awakening and Biochroma give them obvious advantages in the fields of cellular and genetic manipulation, along with artificial intelligences. All of which have a great deal of crossover potential and can lead to a lot of the same scientific discoveries or achievements - its more accurate to say that the nature of the different magic systems sets things up for them to approach certain end scientific goals from very different distinct angles).

Edited by ROSHtaFARian2.0
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There've been discussions about using the cognitive realm as a "Hyperspace" for a couple years now, but until Oathbringer we mostly only had minor glimpses into how it functioned which limited speculation quite a bit, hopefully we should get some new theories cropping up soon...

One of the limitations of using the cognitive realm as a "hyperspace" method of transportation is that it basically limits you to areas of the galaxy that contain (fairly) intelligent life. If you've got a destination in mind, you'd best hope it happens to be within a stone's throw from a populated planet. On the other hand, space is big with lots of unimportant or barren patches spanning large swaths of the dwarf galaxy the Cosmere takes place in. If you go out exploring specifically like the good old Enterprise, you've got a shortcut to the new life forms and new alien civilizations of the galaxy with the empty bits cut away. 

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1 hour ago, Batemenace said:

There've been discussions about using the cognitive realm as a "Hyperspace" for a couple years now, but until Oathbringer we mostly only had minor glimpses into how it functioned which limited speculation quite a bit, hopefully we should get some new theories cropping up soon...

One of the limitations of using the cognitive realm as a "hyperspace" method of transportation is that it basically limits you to areas of the galaxy that contain (fairly) intelligent life. If you've got a destination in mind, you'd best hope it happens to be within a stone's throw from a populated planet. On the other hand, space is big with lots of unimportant or barren patches spanning large swaths of the dwarf galaxy the Cosmere takes place in. If you go out exploring specifically like the good old Enterprise, you've got a shortcut to the new life forms and new alien civilizations of the galaxy with the empty bits cut away. 

Uninhabited planets would also have a small presence as long as people know about them. Might just be a few square meters, but that's enough if you know what you're doing.

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